CE N’EST PAS MA FAUTE ! ...
This Is Not My Fault !...

Summary/Abstract: The purpose of this article is to study the concept of failure, associated with an all-pervading feeling of guilt, as employed in Eugene Ionesco’s plays, in order to better understand his specific strategy of joining comedy and tragedy. On this basis, the emergent concepts of slow movement, freeze mob, and speechlessness should be taken into account, for the reason that they show the relationship of characters to marionettes. By researching this very relation, it becomes evident that, trying to adjust themselves, they seek a way to escape, being stuck in a process of alienation, (im)mobility, continuous degradation, and destruction (as in Tinguely’s kinetic sculptures). Therefore, notions like repetitiveness, circularity, passivity, and muteness are present throughout Ionesco’s plays and appear to be, to some extent, the right solution in order to break away from disconcerting conventions, conformity, and social norms. The current article will present these points in short and will focus, at the same time, on some particular texts providing illustrative examples.

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